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In this case it represents the difference in slander laws. You can be sued for slander if you make a statement of fact about someone that you cannot prove to be factual in a court of law, rather than only having to demonstrate that you believed that fact to be true. The simple solution is to couch statements as opinions rather than as facts or where you manage a forum ensure that all users are informed that 'all' postings regardless of content are the 'opinions' of the poster and should not be construed as

The beer mat lady?
Her friends later admitted to putting the beer mat in her bag as a joke without her realising, but they still locked her up.
An interesting thing that all your quality examples have in common is that western style judicial process wasn't really followed in any of the cases, their trials were all a farce.
I guess that says something about most of the world.

Because the purpose of every country's legislative branch is to add laws, not remove them. The judiciary's job is to review laws, not remove them. And the executive branch's job is to suggest, review, and approve laws, not remove them. Therefore, the older the country, the more laws. And it doesn't take long before all the major ones required have been added, so there is an inevitable climb toward the bottom, to regulate even the smallest matters, until everyone is a criminal, though they may not know or consider themselves as such, in some fashion.

Why are we regulating cabbage? Are they requiring the price to be low to combat anti-competition tactics in cabbage syndicates? This is amazing. It would be decidedly less amazing if our national dish included cabbage like a number of eastern European countries, but... I don't know anyone who actually eats it on a regular basis apart from a monthly (maybe) trip to KFC for some.
This will likely get marked flamebait, but I am actually curious as to the need for regulation here. Is it related to potatoes /

Why are we regulating cabbage? Are they requiring the price to be low to combat anti-competition tactics in cabbage syndicates?

The government has regulated the cost of food for a long time for many reasons...

1. The free market cannot be trusted to maintain price stability. If there was a sudden drop or rise in the price of food, then people might not be able to afford it, or in the reverse, that farmers would go bankrupt and supply would diminish. When it comes to basic needs things like food, electricity, water, stability often sought after.

2. There is no cabbage cabal, only Zuul.

3. Incorporating a price floor prevents large corporations from winning based on economy of scale -- they cannot undersell smaller operations, thus existing infrastructure (land, mainly) will never be repurposed at a lower cost. But it "protects rural america" doing this.

1. The free market cannot be trusted to maintain price stability. If there was a sudden drop or rise in the price of food, then people might not be able to afford it, or in the reverse, that farmers would go bankrupt and supply would diminish. When it comes to basic needs things like food, electricity, water, stability often sought after.

You would be surprised at how unobvious that is to so many people. I recently spent the better part of 5 or 6 posts talking to a guy over subsidies and their intent whil

The free market cannot be trusted to maintain employment stability. If there was a sudden drop or rise in the employment, then people might not be able to afford food or shelter, or in the reverse, the employers would go bankrupt and supply would diminish.

What's the difference between not having cheap enough food and not having enough money to buy food?

Does the GP ACTUALLY think that the massive and powerfull aggricultural lobbies exist to keep corporations from "winning"? Large "family" farms (usually a corporate operation privately owned at that size), very large family farms, and non-family farms (8 percent of all farms) account for 68% of production in the US. Who do you think is benefiting most from a price floor? Cut prices by 3/4 and eliminate the competition or make twice as much with a price floor. Hmmm... USDA stats on the matte [usda.gov]

The food price stability argument is bullshit. If the government were really concerned about food shortages in times of crisis they would set up emergency food supply stores across the country. You would only need to store things like grains, which last for a very long time and provide enough nutrition to live on until the crisis has passed. This would cost the US citizen significantly less per year than the farm subsidies do.

Lol... You must be a special kind of ignorant. This is already done and has bee

Farms would certainly go under, but this would be a corrective measure. Populist farm measures were implemented to keep farmers in business, not to prevent starvation--there are too many chefs in the pot already, and instead of letting the market correct itself (who wants poor ol' farmers to have to feel the pinch?) it's more politically expedient to prop up the excess farms and get votes.

If prices rises, farmers will likely try to increase their yields leading to eventually lower prices, or more farms will open. If the price falls, then that would almost certainly be due to supply. You say that farmers would go bankrupt and supply would diminish if prices fell too much, but you fail to ask why prices would fall--it would almost certainly be due to an overproduction of any particular foodstuff to begin with, so farms going out of businesses would be a corrective measure. The reason small

Price fall for a variety of reasons. Farms aree NOT a corrective measure the way youi think of them. You can't stop and start a farm business, yit needs constent work. When you happen to ahve a poor yield, you need to work it so it's ready for the next year. If we let just the amrket drive it, we wil have a low yield years, farmers will go out of business, and then the next year we wont have enough.

A bad year, or decade even, can be caused by forces other then market forces. too little water, too much water,a freeze, insects, and disease can kill a yield even when demand is high.

You do realize we are talking about food here, right? People die without it?

maybe you should take a look of what farming and food markets are actually like before yapping off?

I'm normally for heavy regulation of corporations so long as it is GOOD regulation; corporations NEVER have the public welfare or public good in mind. People say the electricity problems in California were from overragulation, but rather than overragulation they stemmed from BAD regulation.

In the US, there is a lot of BAD regulation regarding farming. Small family farms are dying, big megacorporation food factories are taking over. And the food sucks. I'm glad I have a back yard I can grow a garden in, too

The US Will have similar wastes of time and money on it's law books. All laws should have a mandatory default time limit of somewhere around one generation, about 25 years after which they have to be renewed or are removed from the books.

That's an extremely starry eyed and naive idea of much primary production regulation.

The alternative and reality in most cases is that huge corporate interests, often the supermarkets and generally large agricultral management corps want to apply pressure on smaller and independant farmers. Large supermarkets don't like having to deal with small farmers and in many cases are in direct competition with smaller farms through their own holdings in large agricultural management firms. And obviously large agri-holdings have many reasons to want to shove the small old school independents out of business.

But you keep believing the government is acting primarily in the interests of the handful of small 100 - 2000 acre unorganized independent farmers remaining in the west rather than the large billion dollar agri-corps and supermarkets that give politicians hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds each year.

Unless of course you also read this on snopes and decided it was a good time to perpetrate an urban legend. *shrugs*

What's truly silly about this urban legend is that there are plenty of *real* examples of excessively long government documents. Google for "military brownie specification" for an example ("wc" tells me it's only 9660 words, but I'm sure there are some others that can equal or exceed the 26,911 number).

But the fact is, as the GP pointed out, you don't have to be male to be called "dude". It was obvious that he wasn't calling girlintraining a city slicker or a fancy dresser. From the context it was obvious the meaning was "fellow". Kennedy would say "My fellow Americans", Obama would more likely use the more contemporary "Dudes". Kennedy wasn't just referring to men whan he spole to his "fellow Americans".

By removing your urban legend portion your point is now lost. Unless, of course, we also remove the Gettysburg address since it isn't actually law of any sort, then we see a pattern forming; although you can't really make a good pattern based off of two occurrences.

This is all assuming that your "point" was that laws are using up more and more words, which wasn't very cle

There's some validity to your point, though I think you're overstating things. Larger populations with more communication and more encompassing economies require more regulation. However, instead of engaging you further on this interesting political question, I would merely like to point out that the thing about cabbage regulation is a long-time rhetorical legend with no basis in fact. Please take more care about repeating stories without checking them.

Most of the ten commandments are not enforceable by law though. Murder the theft are crimes. Bearing false witness is only a crime in some circumstances. More to the point it is against the law to enforce some of them, seeing as most western countries have some provisions for freedom of religion).

Laws do get removed and replaced over time. What tends to happen is that breaches of some particular law first start getting minimal sentences. Then cases invoking it start getting dismissed the public prosecuto

So a 9/11 Australian conspiracy theorist, Greg Smith, gets his butt whooped in an on-line thread that he participated in (big surprise). And now he wants to sue over his damaged character? I suspect his damaged reputation has much more to do with what he said and how he handled it.

Finally on BBC News we go to Sheila McCarthy, who is braving the UNIX longhairs on Slashdot to bring us a *WHOOOOSH* post. What's happening there Sheila, you big-titted should've-been-a-pornstar shagpot? Oh, thinking out loud again. Errrrm, cut to Sheila, cut to...

- At Slashdot -

I'm reporting live from Slashdot where someone has just mis-understood a joke. "Now what's unusual about that, you news-readin' ho'?" You might ask. The person doing the mis-understanding is a male, basement-dweller, with an enormous beard and a stupendously huge... collection of adult videos. But the unusual thing is how smash here is a four-digit UID'er. This is someone who has spent literally millenia on Slashdot, yet when he saw this -- fairly elementary -- joke, it flew right over his head. Let me tell you, Dermot MacDermott, it was quite a sight and not something this community is likely to forget in a hurry.

- back in the studio (where Dermot is scratching his crotch with one hand, whilst gesticulating toward a monitor screen with another) -

Those fuckin' tits man, they're like what they model implants on, you sure they're fuckin' real man? *Ahem* So Sheila... Is it likely that Slashdotters will erect some sort of monument to this event, maybe erect a... ummm... statue?

- Outside Slashdot HQ, Soviet Nealistan -

There have been discussions of celebrating this event yearly, some names for the event have been discussed, but have all been shit so far. For example: "smash-n-whooosh", "-1 Funny Day" and "Day of the Whooosh" are some of the names suggested. Since these are a bit shit, it has been decided -- in a joint meeting of Neal Industry executives, Netcraft's resident BSD troll, and Rob - Dingo Ate Ma Baby - Malda -- that a name for this soon-to-be historic occassion be opened up to the wider Slashdot community. With a winner being the first post following this one to be moderated "+5 Troll". We're attempting to get an interview with smash, but until we can find him it's back to Dermot in the studio in London, where hopefully he's not having a wank like during the report on women's mud wrestling last Thursday, dirty bastard.

This needs to go on "Seen on Slash". This clearly a "best of slashdot" entry if there ever was one. Best post I've read in a long while. Scathing humor, done properly. Tip of the hat to you sir. If only the rest of Slashdot could write as well.

Hate to see you guys drop off the face of the Internet, but I guess that's what happens when you get a bunch of pricks in Parliament.
But I guess that the government will figure it out when no one wants to deal with Australia as far as the Internet goes.

You need to read something else besides slashdot reporting greatly exagerated news of our demise. This bunch of pricks are the same as the last bunch of pricks when it comes to mandatory filters; all talk to impress a couple of independent senators. There has never been, nor will there ever be, an Australian "great firewall". The closest thing we have is "the great rabbit fence" but even that leaked rabbits all over the place.

There's also the dingo fence, which originally was to keep the dingos on one side away from the sheep on the other side, but nowdays largely serves to keep the dingos on one side away from the dingos on the other.

Due to the risk of incurring even greater legal costs the company is closing its doors in Australia, and will ban their fellow countrymen from posting there again.

Wait what?

As a longtime user (~10 years) of Zgeek, and an Aussie, I'm pretty sure we haven't been banned. It's just that the site, which is hosted in the US already is going to legally set up shop outside of Australia to avoid these kinds of legal hassles.

For the record, the whole lawsuit thing is a joke, and everyone's aware that it's doomed to failure. The problem is that since Zgeek is essentially run by one guy in his spare time, he doesn't have the resources to fight it effectively, so it's better to run away rather than set yourself up for future problems.

For the record, the site really isn't too much more than a place were people post random news, and a forum which is dominated by in-fighting, trolling, and a bizarre 'shit-in-his-shoes' meme (it was started after Google started rating us highly as place to get life advice). And yes, it's as much fun as it sounds.

For the record, the whole lawsuit thing is a joke, and everyone's aware that it's doomed to failure. The problem is that since Zgeek is essentially run by one guy in his spare time, he doesn't have the resources to fight it effectively, so it's better to run away rather than set yourself up for future problems.

I admire your optimism. But just because everyone is aware that it's insane does not mean the lawsuit will fail.

Yah, they'll just get sued in whatever country they set up in and have the additional difficulty of getting subpoenaed long-distance.

I'm unaware of any country that both has decent bandwidth and does NOT have stupid laws that affect the internet.

I can think of a few regions that fullfil the second clause and could be brought to fulfill the first, but most of them are populated by people who find bronze tools sufficiently indistinguishable from magic and would likely smash the electronics and use them as spe

For the record, the site really isn't too much more than a place were people post random news, and a forum which is dominated by in-fighting, trolling, and a bizarre 'shit-in-his-shoes' meme (it was started after Google started rating us highly as place to get life advice). And yes, it's as much fun as it sounds.

I've said it before and I'll say it again we need a Bill of Rights in the country. Currently we have almost none. Freedom of religion and free opinion of the government. Nothing else... Free speech would be nice.

Nine other European democracies also have "Royal families" and put their heads on their notes. The reason for this is simple (and it applies to Australia and NZ too.) So long as we have the Battenbergs notionally in power, there is no risk of a member of the Bush or Murdoch families ever becoming British (or Head of State. We have a powerless monarchy (and in the UK case the prospect of a tree hugging left wing eco-friendly King) precisely because we've seen how Presidential systems work, and we want nothin